So Bright, So Beautiful

[Subterranean Intro: Free time; low guitar drone, distant metal resonance, three delicate harmonics above black silence] [Verse 1: Slow 6/8; close-miked guttural falsetto, gravelly and possessive] Little golden in our palm, Warm against the dripping black, Smooth and secret, bright and lovely, Always waiting when we came back. Cold stones bites and fishies spoil, Old bones sleeps beside the wall, Still the Precious shines for us, Makes the darkness soft and small. [Refrain: Slow 5/4; rasped tenderness, words kept legible] So bright, so beautiful, Hidden under skin and bone, Small enough for fingers closing, Strong enough to be our home. Precious knows us in the darkness, Whispers sweetly through the years. Whole wide world forgets poor us, Precious always keeps us near. [Verse 2: Alternating 7/8 and 6/8; crawling bass beneath sparse toms] Sun goes thin and faces fades, Names gets lost beneath the ground. Hands grows crooked, eyes grows wider, Still we knows the lovely sound. Five years, maybe five hundreds— Time goes strange inside the deep. Precious resting close beside us, Precious watching while we sleep. [Interlude: Precious motif repeats; its final harmonic disappears] [Verse 3: Sparse 4/4 with long rests; voice grows frightened] Empty pocket. [Pause] Empty hand. Where has Precious gone and hid? We crawls over stones and fishies, Checks each crack like good ones did. Maybe playing. Maybe angry. Maybe wants us searching more. We was careful with the Precious— Why it leaves us on the floor? [Fracture Refrain: Uneven 7/8 and 5/8; clipped breath between phrases] Precious loves us. Precious needs us. Would not leaves us here alone. Thiefses has it. Nasty pockets. Foreign fingers on our own. [Progressive Instrumental Spiral: Guitars circle in 5/4 against restrained 6/8 toms; bass motif repeats without resolving] [Bridge: Guttural, cracked, increasingly frantic] Finger hurts without its weight. Hand keeps closing on the air. Ears keeps turning for the whisper. Eyes finds golden nowhere there. Hunger bites and cold keeps crawling, Still those pains is small and dull. Losing Precious cuts much deeper, Eats us empty, eats us whole. [Brief silence] [Final Refrain: Slow heavy 4/4; broken guttural lament] So bright... So beautiful... Dark is wrong without the golden. Stone is only nasty stone. Every tunnel goes to nowhere. Every echo comes alone. So bright... So beautiful... All our lost time had meaning. Now the Precious gone away, All the dark has swallowed everything In one wicked, empty day. [Outro: Instruments thin into drone; voice exhausted] Keep the fishies. Keep the mountain. Keep the years we cannot name. Give us back our little circle. Give us back our lovely flame. Where has Precious gone, my beautiful? Why it leaves poor us alone? One hand closes in the darkness, Guarding where our love has gone. [Final instrumental decay: Incomplete Precious motif repeats once, leaving only the subterranean drone]